Rams avoid question about final say on draft day

Posted by Gregg Rosenthal on February 15, 2012, 1:14 PM EDT

AP

The Rams introduced G.M. Les Snead Tuesday to the local media. The 41-year-old former Falcons personnel executive is well regarded for grinding film and was seen as a rising star in the scouting community.

There was a perception surrounding the Rams G.M. job that it wouldn’t contain as much power as some other positions available this offseason. Coach Jeff Fisher will have a lot of say.

“We don’t anticipate differences of opinion,” Fisher said via the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “But in the event that there are, we will move on to the next player. It will be a consensus. As we said, it’s a partnership.”

Fisher sees a three-man partnership between himself, Snead, and Rams COO Kevin Demoff, who handles the business side of things. Fisher believes they will avoid butting heads through preparation.

“The work will be done prior to the draft,” Fisher said. “The time that we’ll be spending collectively together is enormous right now. And I would say a week before we’re ready to pick, we will have made all our decisions.”

We don’t doubt Fisher that consensus is the goal and the primary way to decide on players. Ultimately, someone usually has the contractual right to make the final decision in cases of disagreement.

We suspect Fisher is that someone, and the team didn’t want to undercut Snead’s introductory press conference by talking about it.

There was a newspaper interview featuring ex-Packers director of player personnel Dick Corrick in which he hinted that the legendary coach/GM of the team ignored his scouts’ advice to select Joe Montana and Ronnie Lott and instead placed phone calls to college coaches during the draft to ask if they had any players they personally would recommend.

That’s how Green Bay wound up with “a fine young man” named Rich Campbell at QB and a fullback named Steve Avery–while Corrick and his talent evaluators reached for their straitjackets and the cyanide.

In other words, it doesn’t matter who makes the final decision, as long as he takes into account the viewpoints of the professionals who spent a year on the road gathering critical data.

This whole “Final Say” thing is overrated. No Head Coach has the time to deal with all the Personnel matters day-to-day, and no GM is going to force a Coach to take a player that he absolutely doesn’t want.

The Coach decides what kind of players he wants, and the GM, along with the Personnel Staff, goes out and finds those players. It’s that simple.